What is Color Space

What is Color Space

Overview

A range of colors can be created by the primary colors of pigment and these colors then define a specific color space. Color space, also known as the color model (or color system), is an abstract mathematical model which simply describes the range of colors as tuples of numbers, typically as 3 or 4 values or color components (e.g. RGB). Basically speaking, color space is an elaboration of the coordinate system and sub-space. Each color in the system is represented by a single dot.

A color space is a useful method for users to understand the color capabilities of a particular digital device or file. It represents what a camera can see, a monitor can display or a printer can print, and etc. There are a variety of color spaces, such as RGB, CMY, HSV, HIS. We will talk about RGB color space in this article.

RGB Color Space

RGB (R=Red, G=Green, B=Blue) is a kind of color space which uses red, green and blue to elaborate color model. An RGB color space can be simply interpreted as "all possible colors" which can be made from three colors for red, green and blue. In such conception, each pixel of an image is assigned a range of 0 to 255 intensity values of RGB components. That is to say, using only these three colors, there can be 16,777,216 colors on the screen by different mixing ratios.

Nowadays, the majority of monitors adopt RGB color space because it is a convenient color model for computer graphics and the human visual system works in a similar way. As we know, currently the most popular RGB color spaces are sRGB and Adobe RGB.

sRGB was developed by both HP and Microsoft in 1977, where "S" can be interpreted as "standard"; while Adobe RGB is a standard color gamut from Adobe. For these two commonly-used color spaces, Adobe RGB offers a wider color space comparing to sRGB, and it contains CMYK color gamut (sRGB does not have it). As a result, Adobe RGB has richer color layers and lower color saturation. So if you want to fine-tune the color saturation of your captured photographs, we recommend you choose Adobe RGB mode.

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